Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

Let us look at the essence of a drama. A personal drama makes it seem like your salvation is dependent upon you achieving something in your sphere, something that cannot be completed without the co-operation of other people. The epic drama makes it seem like the salvation of the world cannot be completed without achieving something in this world, such as making Christianity the only religion on earth.

The central illusion is that the drama is not a drama but reality. You will believe that either yourself or the world will not be saved until the goal defined by the drama has been achieved physically. Because this goal is defined based on an illusion, it can never be achieved, meaning that you are pursuing an impossible goal. You can seek this goal indefinitely, and the only way out of this impossible quest is to come to see the unreality of the drama.

Why is it easier to escape a personal drama than an epic drama? A personal drama is a struggle between you and some authority figure and other people within your own sphere. You are trying to prove yourself right and the others wrong, but you are not trying to prove that God is wrong or that the entire universe is based on a flawed design. A personal drama is clearly centered around you, and there is at least some possibility that you will eventually come to realize that the only way to change your outer situation is to change yourself.

When it comes to the epic drama, you have not only refused to take responsibility for yourself, you have projected that responsibility upon a force that is on a much bigger scale, such as God, the universe or humankind at large. It now becomes possible to believe that the cause for which your drama makes it seem like you are fighting is so big that it could not possibly be resolved by you or could not be resolved in one lifetime. This gives you an even more watertight excuse for not looking at yourself but continuing to project responsibility outside yourself, projecting it on forces or circumstances that a human being on earth could not possible influence alone.

We might say that the personal drama revolves around “me, myself and I,” which keeps it on a scale that at least has the focus on you. When you begin to see through the drama, you can relatively easily see that you do indeed have the power to overcome the drama by changing yourself. The epic drama projects responsibility so far away that it makes it more difficult for lifestreams to accept that they still have the power to overcome the drama. It is easier to see that a personal drama is created in the mind whereas it is far more difficult to see that this is also the case for the epic dramas.

What makes a lifestream susceptible to the epic dramas? It is the lifestream’s personal dramas because the epic dramas tie in to the personal dramas and offer an even more watertight excuse for not looking at the beam in your own eye. If you believe there really is a Battle of Armageddon between God and the devil, and if you believe other people are on the side of the devil, then you can easily believe that you have no reason to look at the beam in your own eye—for you are obviously on the good side. You simply have to keep fighting the bad side until the battle is won—which might happen any day or in a thousand years, but in either case postponing the decision to look in the mirror.

The essence of a drama is that you think the fulfillment of your goals in life (even your salvation) depends on the choices made by other people. The drama makes it seem like you are not responsible for your own destiny. The people around you are, and you have to try to force their will. Epic dramas add that in order to ensure the fulfillment of God’s plan, in order for people to be saved, in order for the battle of Armageddon to be won, you must deal with the free will of all human beings. Instead of just saving yourself, you now have to save the entire universe.

The net effect of this illusion is that it focuses attention on the splinters in the eyes of other people. This causes people who have taken on the drama to use the drama’s “perfect” excuse for not looking at the beam in their own eyes. Why is this a problem? Here is another absolute statement: As long as you are not looking at the beam in your own eye, you are not growing! It really is that simple and there is no way around it.

This is precisely what the dramas make it difficult for people to see. In the previous discourse I said that once you enter a drama, you can no longer see it as a drama. You think that the view of life – the mental box – presented by the drama is real, that it represents the way life really works. You now have the “perfect” excuse for not even considering that the drama is unreal, that it has no more reality than what you – and other people – give to it. You refuse to see that you can indeed walk away from the drama any time.

Consider what you would say about an actor who had become convinced that he really was Hamlet and who refused to take off the costume, insisting on playing the role even outside the theater and claiming he really was the prince of Denmark. You would probably think the person had lost touch with reality. Yet your own personal drama has the exact same effect—it causes you to lose touch with reality. What is the exact effect of this?

Why dramas make you unteachable

Let me first restate an absolute and inescapable fact. The Law of Free Will is the fundamental law of the world of form. You can become a permanent being – an ascended being – only by freely choosing to enter into oneness—oneness with your source and oneness with all life, with the whole. In order to make this choice, you must free your mind from all influence from the consciousness of separation, the consciousness of duality, the consciousness of anti-christ. All dramas are created out of this consciousness so it follows that you cannot make your ascension until you give up any and all dramas.

A drama forms a mental box and the box is closed. Any drama is based on an illusion, a view of reality that is out of touch with reality. This does not mean that the view is completely false. It may indeed contain many ideas that are true in themselves, but the way they are presented in context means that the entire world view cannot lead you to the ascension.

The problem is that once you step inside the mental box defined by the drama, you can no longer see that the world view is an illusion. Instead, from your vantage point inside the box, you think the world view is real, that the world really is the way it appears from inside the mental box of the drama. It is like my often-used example that if you put on yellow glasses, you think the sky really is green.

What is the logical conclusion? When you are inside the mental box of a particular drama, you believe in an illusion. You also believe that this illusion is reality, and this is what makes it a catch-22 that is very difficult to escape.

Consider how the situation looks from the vantage point of a spiritual teacher. The teacher knows your world view is based on an illusion. He knows that the only way you can ascend is to help you see through the illusion. What is the most natural way to seek to help you? It would be a two-fold approach of seeking to present you with a correct world view while pointing out the flaws in your existing world view.

Now consider how you will experience the teacher’s attempts to help you when you see them from inside the box. You think your view is reality, and thus what this self-appointed spiritual teacher is presenting to you can only be unreality. He must be a false teacher and anything he says must be meant to deceive you and make you believe a lie instead of the reality you already have.

The subtle mechanism that comes into play here is that if the Conscious You identifies itself fully with the drama, your mind will be closed to anything that a spiritual teacher could possibly say to you. Nothing could penetrate the defenses erected by your mental box. Anything that goes beyond or contradicts your existing world view will be rejected. In order to help you escape your limited world view, the teacher must of necessity give you knowledge that contradicts or goes beyond your existing world view.

How come some people actually manage to listen to spiritual teachers? Because after having outplayed their dramas for a sufficient amount of time, their conscious selves have begun to doubt the world view presented by its drama. The Conscious You has begun to separate itself from the drama so that it can start opening itself to an outside perspective on the drama—what is presented by the spiritual teacher.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Freedom from Ego Dramas.